Mission: Thwaites 2002
Priority: Baseline
 
This mission is an amalgamation of previous OIB Thwaites flights, and is primarily intended to retain the portions of those flights which in turn repeated the 2002 NASA/Chilean lines. This mission yields a very long dh/dt time history of measurements along these lines.
 
Today’s mission was relatively to easy to select, given that all other options were clouded in and that is a baseline mission. Both observations and models indicated a significant area of downstream Thwaites Glacier that was both presently clear and also forecast to clear further during the day due to increasing outflow. Indeed, those are the conditions we encountered, and the mission proceeded successfully with regularly excellent views. Nearly all instruments reported successful operation throughout. Headwall SWIR channels again experienced an issue halfway through the mission that could not be resolved.
 
Sebastian Marinsek from the Argentine Antarctic Institute (IAA) organization joined both this mission and the previous one.
 
Attached images:
1. Map of today’s mission (John Sonntag / NASA)
2. Close-up of tabular icebergs near the Thwaites Glacier terminus. Note the tremendous amount of fresh snow softening the edges of the normally very angular icebergs (John Sonntag/NASA).
3. A few clouds near the summit of Mount Murphy (Ray Perigo/Indiana University).
4. The new B-46 iceberg, recently calved from Pine Island Glacier, at bottom center, surrounded by its smaller brethren (John Sonntag/NASA).
5. More geometric tabular icebergs, off Pine Island Glacier (John Sonntag/NASA).
6. Kelvin-Helmholtz waves (above the left wingtip), near Mount Murphy. These periodic cloud formations occur in the presence of wind shear, where wind varies sharply with altitude (Dave Porter/Columbia University).